


The Problem of Souls

by moreagaara



Series: The Emperor Revived [5]
Category: Warhammer 40.000, World of Warcraft
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Cross-Posted on deviantArt, Crossover, Deviates From Canon, Emperor Revived, Feeding, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Literature, Minor Character Death, Originally Posted Elsewhere, Originally Posted on deviantART, Post-Canon, Sci-Fi, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Soul Magic, fan fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-04-19
Packaged: 2020-08-14 11:41:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20191690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moreagaara/pseuds/moreagaara
Summary: Notes, at this point in the RP I have ongoing with kaibun-creations, the Emperor decided (mostly on his own) to just send the psykers over to Azeroth and train them there, where it is relatively safe.  Comparatively, anyway.  The Imperium basically has its own floating island attached to Dalaran as a result and they have pretty close relations at this point.  The fact that there is xenos scum everywhere on Azeroth has not been a problem, mostly because Daenus has been setting the tone as "we only hate them if they start stabbing."Peep crusade!Games Workshop:  All the WH40k stuffBlizzard:  Azeroth and relatedMe:  The writing and the Emprah's name





	The Problem of Souls

**Author's Note:**

> Notes, at this point in the RP I have ongoing with kaibun-creations, the Emperor decided (mostly on his own) to just send the psykers over to Azeroth and train them there, where it is relatively safe. Comparatively, anyway. The Imperium basically has its own floating island attached to Dalaran as a result and they have pretty close relations at this point. The fact that there is xenos scum everywhere on Azeroth has not been a problem, mostly because Daenus has been setting the tone as "we only hate them if they start stabbing."
> 
> Peep crusade!  
Games Workshop: All the WH40k stuff  
Blizzard: Azeroth and related  
Me: The writing and the Emprah's name

Daenus had retreated to his labs deep under the Imperial Palace; this time, not to get some peace from his priests (again), but because of a deep-seated feeling of illness. It had been about a week since his father had healed him, and he had noticed that over the course of that week, he had begun feeling…strange. Shortness of breath, fatigue, nausea…and now doubled vision. He just stood in his lab, hands on the table before him, trying to catch his breath and failing. His hearts were beating much too fast.

_What the hells is wrong with me?_

He carefully sank to his knees, suddenly feeling feverish; the feeling of wrongness intensified as he did. He had been trying so hard to ignore it, but when he finally managed to focus, his hands were shaking. It was almost like he was hungry, but he’d been eating and drinking properly…

Although now that he thought about it, he hadn’t really felt satisfied after doing so. His head started to pound, so he cautiously rocked backwards until he was able to put it between his knees, which helped a little. He noticed he was panting, unable to get air; the scars marking the wounds his brother had inflicted upon him were aching badly.

Something was very wrong. Some instinct was screaming at him, and he listened to it for a moment. It yanked him from the form he’d taken in the labs into the warp with a sharp scream that no one was near enough to hear. He looked around in panic, but for now the Chaos Gods were fighting among themselves and weren’t a threat to the Astronomican or the Imperium generally.

Here the feeling of hunger was both much more pronounced and unmistakable. So was the knowledge of what he had to do to keep himself healthy. Mortal food wasn’t going to cut it anymore. He was a god and had been one for some time; while gravely wounded, he had been getting food from two places: the Golden Throne feeding his body intravenously and the souls of the psykers his people had been sacrificing.

His spirit form was in much worse shape than the physical forms he could take were. It was starving and looked the part. He’d been getting a thousand souls every day, and he’d had none for six; he’d hoped that he wouldn’t need to continue devouring the souls of others—the souls of the dead, the souls of his _people_—to sustain himself, but clearly his people’s faith just wasn’t enough.

His attention was yanked to the edge of the Solar system, where a ship as black as the night dropped out of the Warp. Half ecstatic and half deeply disturbed, he leaped towards it; it took a great deal of self-control to not immediately devour at least three holds worth of the psykers on board; it would have been a feast, but he _must not_—

He was called into the holds anyway; his awareness split across each of the twenty holds, each holding a thousand tormented psykers. Their concentration (and therefore his own) was constantly disrupted; flashing lights, loud and discordant noises, the walls themselves blocking access to the Warp—he wanted to comfort them, but was unable to take a solid enough form to do so. Their attention was too disrupted to even detect his presence. He retreated from the larger cells with effort—their need for him was so strong, it hurt to leave them—and tried to find somewhere else quieter.

Deeper in the ship were more isolated points of need. Here the lights were utterly black, and no sound crept but for the occasional dispensing of food or water. There was just enough room to stand and stretch out one’s arms, but none of the prisoners here did that. They all sat in the middle of their cells, utterly silent, motionless save for whenever they were given food. None had contact with the outside world; for all they knew, the universe might have ended and been remade multiple times over. Daenus noticed that all of them had helmets of some sort, and reached out to one.

There was enough contact between his soul and that of this wretched psyker’s that he could feed; his own desperation to eat something—_someone_—eased a little. The psyker didn’t resist his intrusion, didn’t resist anything; she’d been drugged halfway into unconsciousness, and there was a high pitched, disruptive whine just inside her skull; she had stopped trying claw it out after multiple electric shocks taught her not to move unnecessarily. What few thoughts she could keep to herself were turned exclusively towards the Emperor, praying that he would kill her when they arrived. A part of Daenus whispered that he should do so now, to go ahead and consume her soul _now_, he was _hungry_, but he held himself back from that for a moment. Enough to see what she had done to land herself in this situation.

An Inquisitor had been questioning her about some incident that had occurred on her home planet; some important noble or something had been killed, and he was checking to see if she knew anything. She did not, but the Inquisitor hadn’t believed her; she had lost her temper and accidentally unleashed warp lightning on him. The Inquisitor had thankfully lived, but he had contacted the people on the Black Ship he’d hitched a ride on to fetch her. She had tried to apologize, but they didn’t care. They’d taken her anyway. Her family couldn’t stop them—would have been killed if they’d tried—and she’d been thrown in the Deep Cells to endure the transport alone.

She’d fought at first. Everyone did. Everyone stopped in the end, and so had she. Whatever fate awaited her on Terra was worse than death; she’d attacked an Inquisitor _by accident, she swore it was an accident _but that didn’t matter, nothing mattered…the Emperor would surely kill her if he was as merciful as the priesthood said. Daenus was too upset (and hungry) to refuse her now. He used some of the power she’d given him to create a note of explanation. _She called to me and begged for death. I obliged._

He felt a tiny bit better, but the need from the upper holding cells was overpowering now. He’d eaten something _someone _at last, and he needed to keep going. It took far more effort than he was willing to admit to turn away from the ship and return to Terra. Ten thousand souls were needed to properly amplify the Astronomican so it was visible throughout the Imperium (unless a Warp Storm was in the way), and of those, a thousand died each day. Surely the buildup of souls there would be enough to satiate him; he had eaten none for six days, so there should be six thousand souls waiting for him.

Five thousand awaited him in the core of the Golden Throne; all five thousand fed themselves to their Emperor, each whispering in terror of some horned creature that had been coming to harvest them and take them away to they knew not what. She/he/it—not Slaanesh, they knew her feeling, and the piece of the Emperor that defended the Astronomican stopped the Chaos God from coming too close—would stalk among them, selecting a few, and taking them away. Past the edge of the Warp, not to where the distant piece of the Emperor was, but somewhere else. Somewhere terrifying. One had tried to stop her, but had merely been squashed with a thought; the Astronomican-Emperor never stopped this creature, he always let it pass. They knew not why.

Daenus, better able to focus, suspected he knew the reason, but didn’t dare voice them. He fully intended to speak to his father about this one, though…along with asking him why he had to eat souls now. Why he had to continue committing this unforgivable sin just to stay alive and healthy; but five thousand souls later, he _did _feel much better. Almost recovered. Almost himself again.

He was still shaky, though. He had come close to something terrible, he was certain of it; he didn’t know what that something terrible would have been, and really didn’t want to find out. As it was…he needed to keep eating regularly. That meant souls, as much as he hated himself for doing it. They were effectively his food now; he would starve without them. Without the faith his people gave him, he would die much faster, but without the souls, he would die a slow and painful death. One more reason to hate being a god, he supposed.

_Still hungry. _He swore at himself; he wanted to keep the level of souls he ate constant, but starving himself had increased the number of souls he needed to stay healthy. He had quietly diverted many of the Black Ships to Azeroth, where the psykers could train in relative safety, and had wanted to divert more, but the needs of the Astronomican remained; just enough of the Black Ships yet came to Terra to keep the choir full. Increasing the size of the choir would easily keep Daenus satisfied, but it would mean fewer psykers properly trained to really fight the Warp and eventually turn the tide of war.

It occurred to him then that people died in the Imperium all the time; most of them had faith in him, and he had the strength now to wander far from the Imperial Palace in search of those faithful souls who could feed him on the moment of their deaths…but passively consuming those who had been killed for him was less sinful. If he just allowed the Imperium to kill psykers for him without protest and only ate their souls so they would not go to waste, it wasn’t nearly as bad as actively hunting down souls to consume.

It would be a step down a path he wouldn’t be able to come back from. He would be making himself far too much like Xander, who kept souls as pets and jewelry without regard to who they had been as people. But at the same time, he would disturb the status of the Imperium much less if he hunted. He meant to return to his body, to call for his father or Guilliman to try and talk through it, but he remained hungry. He would only inflict more damage on his mortal body if he returned now. He had to make the call, one way or another.

Not hunting would mean more psykers enduring the hellish conditions he had seen on board the Black Ships. Not hunting would mean more people like the poor woman whose wish he had granted, tortured until they begged for death for the sole purpose of keeping them compliant. Either the Imperium sinned or he did. So Daenus let himself roam.

The souls of the faithful weren’t nearly as powerful as those of the psykers he was given, but they were numerous. He sighed when he had finally eaten enough that he could safely return to his body, and created a portion of himself to hunt down the “extra” souls he required. Meanwhile, he needed to find his father and finally get around to asking where mom was.  



End file.
